A year ago, Tiangong Ultra was struggling simply to finish a half-marathon. On Saturday, August 22, the Chinese humanoid robot ran 100 meters in 9.39 seconds at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, faster than Jamaican sprinting legend Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second men’s world record.
The astonishing jump in speed is perhaps best understood by looking back at where Tiangong Ultra stood just a year earlier. In April 2025, the humanoid robot competed in the Beijing E-Town Half-Marathon, an event that brought around 12,000 human runners and 21 humanoid robots onto the same race course, with humans and robots running in separate lanes.
